Joe Dieter has talked with countless EasyPost customers. And lately, he’s heard the same concern from many of them: peak season 2025 is a whole new ballgame. Rising costs and unpredictable demand have many shippers scrambling to prepare.

Joe’s advice for confronting the uncertainty? “Ship fast. Don't ship reckless. Be protected.”

And EasyPost offers solutions to accomplish all three goals. 

In this EasyPost Insider episode, Joe and Lori discuss several tools (including a few brand new offerings) to help businesses ship successfully this peak.

The EasyPost Shipping API has always helped businesses purchase shipping labels at great rates from their favorite carriers. Now, EasyPost Wallet is taking the convenience to the next level.

Joe explains, “Wallet [allows] you to quickly get up and running with the carriers and service levels that [help you ship fast] without breaking the bank [or] juggling a lot of carrier relationships.”

He continues, “You have one simple billing experience. You have one invoice experience. You're not having to submit all these customer care or support issues directly to carriers.” 

Sending customers tracking notifications is “table stakes,” reducing support tickets and ensuring that “you don’t have an angry consumer on your hands.”

But the best brands are going beyond the basics, turning tracking notifications into strategic marketing messages.

As Joe puts it, “It's not just, here's the latest update on all your packages. It's also, here's a story we want to tell you that's going to further build that relationship with you, the consumer.” 

The easiest way to level up your tracking? Use Advanced Tracking by EasyPost. “[It] not only gives you real-time updates, it gives you comprehensive, branded, AI-powered predictive tracking.”

Marketplaces want to offer easy, affordable shipping to their sellers (and their sellers’ customers). But they usually don’t have deep experience building the shipping technology that would allow them to do that. 

Enter: EasyPost Forge.

“These big marketplaces do an incredible job of being a marketplace,” Joe explains. “But at their core, they weren't about a shipping operation. So we created something called Forge. Forge allows a marketplace to instantly set up the most reliable shipping software [they] could possibly offer.”

• Connect with Joe on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-dieter/
• Visit EasyPost’s website: https://www.easypost.com/

Peak season shipping can get complicated. International shipping can be a major headache. Combine the two, and it might seem like stress is inevitable. 

But if you follow the best practices recommended by Jonathan Witt, senior partnerships manager at Sendle, your peak season cross-border shipping can be successful and stress-free.

If your business hasn’t yet expanded to international markets, Jonathan highly recommends getting started. His advice? Start small. 

“You don't have to ship everywhere. You don't have to sell globally. It's probably better that you are intentional and selective with countries that you want to sell to, because you want to understand the customer base, as well as all the requirements for shipping internationally.”

Delays lead to frustrated customers—something you don’t want to deal with during the busiest time of the year. By understanding and complying with cross-border shipping regulations, you’ll ensure your goods clear customs and arrive on time.

Jonathan shares a few things to watch out for. “Why do shipments get stuck? Usually because of missing or wrong documents, [like] your commercial invoice, which has all the product information.”

He continues, “Make sure that on the commercial invoice, you're associating your products with the right HS code. Make sure that you're listing the country of origin correctly in case that package does get inspected.”

If you’re shipping internationally, delivered duty paid (DDP), “where the buyer or the receiver has to pay all the shipping costs and duties and taxes upfront at checkout,” is generally the best way to handle things. 

While delivered duty unpaid (DDU) can work in some situations, it’s best to avoid surprise fees upon package delivery.

As Jonathan puts it, “Being a little bit more transparent … just makes a better customer experience.”

• Connect with Jonathan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-witt-372a65b4/
• Visit Sendle’s website: https://www.sendle.com/en-us

July 2025 didn’t bring any earth-shattering developments—but that doesn’t mean nothing happened. When you look closely, you can see subtle but significant shifts in the realm of shipping and logistics. 

In this episode, Lori Boyer and Tim Ranagan discuss the latest trends and share some strategies for adapting. Here’s a rundown:

This time of year usually sees an increase in warehouse jobs as businesses start preparing for the holiday shipping season. But 2025 isn’t staying on script.

Lori explains, “Typically, as we hit about July, from July through November … we see about 10,000 to 15,000 additional warehouse jobs open up. [But this] July, we actually lost almost 6,500 warehouse jobs. … We have our lowest number of total warehouse roles … since COVID.” 

Warehouse labor isn’t the only thing on the decline. In July, domestic package volume dropped by 7.3% year-over-year. The result? Carriers—especially national ones—have been adjusting their operations and raising prices to protect their margins.

“In the last month or so, FedEx [has] consolidated its network. It's been cutting staff. … [And] USPS just raised its rates again.”

To keep shipping costs low, Lori and Tim recommend diversifying your carrier mix. As Lori puts it, “You shouldn't ever have a single carrier.”

We’re coming up on a “peak season of uncertainty and a little challenge.” Amidst economic uncertainty and decreasing consumer demand, shippers should focus on flexibility. 

“You need to communicate, you need to diversify, [you need to] keep an eye on what's going on, and … be ready to pivot and make changes on the fly."

• Connect with Lori on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/loribboyer/
• Connect with Tim on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-ranagan-mba-2717bb125/
• Visit EasyPost's website: https://www.easypost.com/

When you’re shipping perishables like produce, the stakes are high; even a one-day delay can ruin an entire truckload of food.

Colby Varley, vice president and principal at Advanced Transportation Services (ATS), explains what’s going on in the perishable freight world and how logistics companies and shippers can work together to make sure every load arrives in perfect condition.

The COVID-19 pandemic shook up the freight shipping industry, and now that things have settled, loading efficiency is the name of the game. Colby explains, “[During] COVID … they were shipping whatever they could, whether it was half a truck or a quarter of a truck. They were just shipping it. Since then, that trend has reversed. Now everybody is maximizing their cube space.”

But he’s seen a troubling pattern lately: certain types of produce haven’t been doing well, with some freight companies struggling to fill trucks.

“[For] the Mexican grape crop, they're estimating about a 2 million box loss out there. … [If] you take 2 million boxes out of the equation, that's a lot of trucks that aren’t going to get loads. … We've had trucks every week deadheading back to California to come pick up a load because there's just nothing there."

Colby’s advice for freight companies? Choose a specialty and stick with it. “Stay in your niche, stay in your lane, and become the expert in that field, whether you're doing dry freight, doing bulk tanker, [or] doing flatbed.”

He uses ATS as an example: “The markets fluctuate all the time. But we just stay true to highly perishable food and produce.”

Growers looking for the best deal on freight shipping might be tempted to spring for a good deal. But low costs can come with risks, especially with cargo as volatile as fresh fruits and vegetables. According to Colby, great service is worth paying for.

“Service is the number one thing. And we do have to charge a little bit more for that. … On any produce shipment, the difference between being one day late is the difference of that produce making it through quality control [or] not.”

• Connect with Colby on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colby-varley-5ba57a69/
• Visit Advanced Transportation Services’s website: https://advancedtransportationservices.com/

Most retailers view returns as a necessary evil. You have to offer returns to stay competitive, but accepting unwanted or damaged products—and shipping replacements—drains resources and wastes time. 

What if it didn’t have to be that way?

In this episode, Virgil Ghic, co-founder of WeSupply, makes a bold claim: returns don’t have to be a cost center. In fact, with the right strategy, they can even drive revenue! 

If you want returns to be profitable, you can’t just implement a cookie-cutter policy. 

Virgil explains, “If [you] are just offering a 30-day return policy, no questions asked, the chances of making it profitable are none. Most likely you're just going to lose a lot of money. But if you are designing the experience, designing the outcomes, designing the logistics behind the scenes … then you're going to have a profitable [policy]. Even if it's not profitable, you are going to decrease the cost significantly.” 

Virgil shares two ideas for making returns profitable: encouraging customers to choose store credit and allowing in-store returns.

• Store credit. To encourage buyers to shop from your store after making a return, Virgil recommends incentivizing store credit rather than cash back. “[Let’s say] you have a $100 item that you are exchanging for an $80 item. You can offer [the remaining $20] as a refund, [or] you can offer $25 as store credit.” 
• In-store returns. People who walk into the store to return a product usually end up purchasing something else. So if you have brick-and-mortar locations, make sure the in-person returns experience is smooth and convenient.

Of course, the best way to handle returns is to prevent them in the first place. For that, you’ll need data—lots of it. “If you have the data, you can look into it and … analyze it. You can take action on it.”

For example, consider a dress that lots of people return because of sizing issues. 

“[Saying] it doesn't fit doesn't tell you anything. … If we are just asking the customer [is it] too big or too small, that's not actionable. Nobody knows what to do with that data.”

The solution? Get specific. Ask the customer exactly why the fit is wrong, then adjust the dress or refine the sizing description on your website. “[Once] you understand [the issue] … you give [the product] back to the merchandising team or the manufacturing team, and they can do adjustments. And they can maybe say on the website, this model runs big or runs wide.”

• Connect with Virgil on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/virgilghic/
• Visit WeSupply’s website: https://wesupplylabs.com/

So far, 2025 has kept us on our toes, especially with all the uncertainty surrounding tariffs. But in this episode of Unboxing the Trends, Lori and Tim take a break from the tariff talk to discuss three major trends from June: warehouse automation, carrier shifts, and drone deliveries.

Listen to this 15-minute episode to get up to date with the latest shipping and logistics happenings! 

As of last month, Amazon has deployed over a million robots in their warehouses. As Lori points out, robots now outnumber human workers! It might sound a little dystopian, but automation is incredibly helpful for businesses—as long as they don’t neglect their human employees. 

Lori recommends, “Don’t just drop some tech in without training. Make sure that your people are part of the process.”

UPS and FedEx have each made changes to their relationships with Amazon. “UPS has pulled back a whole bunch from its Amazon business,” Lori explains, “while FedEx has picked up a bunch of the Amazon volume.” 

What does that mean for your shipping?

“If you're super UPS dependent, you might see maybe a little bit of disruption … maybe some reliability concerns. On the flip side, if you are heavily dependent on FedEx, you'll have steady operation that's expanded, but you might face tighter capacity.”

Walmart has partnered with Wing to offer drone delivery to over 100 new stores across major metropolitan areas like Houston and Atlanta. 

This signals that drone delivery may be moving past the “novelty stage [and] expanding into something that people are starting to use and expect.”

But don’t get too excited yet. It remains to be seen whether drone delivery will take off or fall flat. The two determining factors: regulations and cost-effectiveness.

• Connect with Lori on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/loribboyer/
• Connect with Tim on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-ranagan-mba-2717bb125/
• Visit EasyPost’s website: https://www.easypost.com/

Now that we’re past the halfway point of the year (can you believe it?), it’s time to get serious about peak season. When handled right, peak is an opportunity to drive more sales than ever, reach new markets, and continue to delight loyal customers. 

But will tariffs, inflation, and other issues stand in the way? 

Sucharita Kodali, retail industry analyst at Forrester, explains exactly what’s going on in the retail industry, what we can expect from the 2025 peak season, and how to get ready. 

It’s no secret that the past few months have been full of economic uncertainty for both consumers and businesses. Sucharita says that while essential goods are still in high demand, retailers that sell non-essentials may be struggling.

“There is a particularly uncertain vibe [due to] … not knowing where the tariff situation may land, as well as consumer confidence not being terribly high, which means that a lot of discretionary items are more vulnerable.”

Sucharita points out an interesting contradiction: while consumer confidence has been “quite low,” spending levels in 2025 are still relatively high—even when adjusted for inflation. That’s good news for businesses moving into the holiday season.

Even so, she predicts that peak season will see heavy discounting as usual (consumers, rejoice!) unless brands face major supply chain issues.

She notes, “There's no reason to hold onto inventory and hoard it. So unless there's a supply shock, I can't envision a scenario where it's not going to be another heavy discounting season.”

The decision to frontload inventory depends on many factors, including storage and transportation costs, margins, categories, and anticipated demand. According to Sucharita, “Perhaps the biggest issue is [whether] you have cash. If you don't have any money and you don't have any savings, does it make sense to put yourself in credit card debt? No.” 

So if you’re thinking about stocking up ahead of peak season, make sure your cash flow can support the extra costs you’ll incur.

• Connect with Sucharita on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sucharitamulpuru/
• Visit Forrester’s website: https://www.forrester.com/bold/

In this episode of Unboxing Logistics, host Lori Boyer kicks off Season 5 with a fun and insightful discussion about gamification in the supply chain. Joined by Katie Brown, Senior Director of Product Management at Foot Locker, and Dylan Telford, Omnichannel Practice Lead at Summit Advisory Team, they explore how introducing game-like elements into warehouse operations can drive motivation, improve productivity, and even make picking and packing a bit more fun.

Gamification isn’t just displaying performance stats. Real impact comes when the experience feels rewarding, includes clear goals, and provides a reason to play, whether that’s pay-for-performance, team recognition, or personal growth.

“Everybody who's attempting to get to that win in the end is successful in playing the game.” —Dylan Telford

Before introducing competition or incentives, teams need to define what success looks like and track it consistently. Without goals and metrics, gamification falls flat.

“You need to be able to measure. Otherwise you're playing a game with no goals.” —Dylan Telford

Gamification shouldn’t be complicated. Start small, involve the team, and keep improving based on real feedback. And don’t forget: it’s just as important to lift up lower performers as it is to celebrate top ones.

“Sometimes bringing up the bottom is almost more impactful than raising the top of the bar.” —Katie Brown

Links

• Connect with Katie Brown on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/katie-brown-41807347 
• Visit Foot Locker’s website: https://www.footlocker.com/ 
• Connect with Dylan Telford on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/dylan-telford-b7404769 
• Visit Summit Advisory Team’s website:  https://summitadvisoryteam.com/ 

In this EasyPost Insider episode of Unboxing Logistics, host Lori Boyer sits down with Senior Product Manager Brittany Williams to unveil Forge, EasyPost’s newest product. Built for 3PLs, marketplaces, tech companies, and carriers, Forge offers a white-label shipping solution that makes it easy to onboard customers, manage subaccounts, and access detailed analytics—all without burdening your dev team. Whether you want to enable new carriers with a click or centralize billing, Forge simplifies complex operations with powerful admin tools and best-in-class APIs.

"Forge is EasyPost’s solution for businesses that want to white label our shipping technology into their own products and services . . . it’s about bringing more value to your customers and your team without time waste."

"I have two top contenders in terms of features. First is Forge's administrative tools around customer management . . . The second feature to call out is the analytics. I think EasyPost does a lot of things really well, but analytics is one of those things that we do truly better than anybody else."

"[Y]ou could begin creating customer records in hour one, minute one . . . if you're an existing customer, and you want to upgrade your dashboard to the Forge dashboard, there is no lift . . ."

• Connect with Brittany Williams on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brittany-williams-597289124/  
• Learn more about Forge: www.easypost.com/forge 

In this month’s episode of Unboxing the Trends, Tim Ranagan and Lori Boyer dive into the latest shifts in the shipping landscape—no tariff talk this time. From the rise of regional carriers to DHL’s B2C restrictions and changes at the USPS, it’s a carrier-heavy episode packed with actionable insights. Lori also previews her upcoming appearance at the National Postal Forum and speculates on the future of USPS leadership.

Alternative carriers have stepped up in a major way, delivering 44% more packages in 2024 than the previous year. Much of that volume shifted away from FedEx and UPS, with major retailers like Amazon and Walmart expanding their own delivery networks. 

Lori emphasizes the importance of carrier diversification, saying, “We’re no longer in that era of just sticking with the big dogs.” 

If you’ve been relying on a favorite carrier, it may be time to rethink your strategy—and even renegotiate your contracts.

DHL has temporarily paused cross-border B2C shipments over $800, citing customs-related complications. This change doesn’t impact B2B shipments, but small businesses shipping high-value items to customers directly could be caught off guard. 

Lori urges businesses to stay proactive by diversifying cross-border options and staying connected with customs advisors and logistics consultants to avoid surprises.

With Postmaster General Louis DeJoy stepping down, the logistics world is waiting to see who will lead USPS next. Lori floats the idea of a possible announcement at the upcoming National Postal Forum. 

Meanwhile, USPS has adjusted service standards: Rural Ground Advantage and First-Class Mail may now see an extra day in transit. If you serve rural customers, it’s worth reviewing your delivery timelines to ensure you’re still hitting SLAs.

• Connect with Lori on LinkedIn
• Connect with Tim on LinkedIn
• Visit EasyPost’s website